Britain's first female (and first Scottish) poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy has won such major awards as the Whitbread, Lannan, E.M. Forster, and T.S. Eliot prizes. She is also a playwright, and with director Tim Supple has adapted many Grimm fairy tales for London's Young Vic theater. Rather than dramatizations, however, this volume collects 16 of Duffy's enchantingly potent and well-turned retellings of such classics as "Snow White," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Ashputtel" ("Cinderella"), and "Little Red-cap" ("Little Red Riding-Hood"). Duffy strips away the varnish that has built up over centuries of sanitized rewrites, giving us again the gruesome fates of such irredeemable characters as Cinderella's stepsisters and Snow White's evil stepmother, and also enriches these tales with her own wonderfully evocative language and hilarious depictions.